Culture » July 24, 2017

The White-Supremacist Roots of America’s Libertarian Right

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The intellectual theorists of white race privilege recognized that such head-on confrontations wouldn’t protect the old Jim Crow order for long. The problem was democracy itself: American opinion was turning against Southern racism.

Democracy often comes down to honest math. After the 1965 passage of the federal Voting Rights Act, 20th century America seemed to be on a path toward the democratic ideal of “one person, one vote.” Yet the 21st century has seen enormous reversals of this hard-won progress. Not only have two oligarchic GOP presidents been elected without the popular vote, but crude efforts to suppress ballot access at all levels have become commonplace.

But the intellectual theorists of white race privilege recognized that such head-on confrontations wouldn’t protect the old Jim Crow order for long. The problem was democracy itself: American opinion was turning against Southern racism.

That’s where the intellectual antihero of MacLean’s book, James Buchanan, comes in. A Tennessee-born free-market fundamentalist who chaired the economics department at the University of Virginia (UVA), Buchanan launched a new center of political economy at the school in 1956 to break “the powerful grip [of ] collectivist ideology.”

In 1959, the fire-breathing libertarian theorists at UVA thrust themselves into the heart of Virginia’s desegregation battle by proposing a now-familiar libertarian ploy: privatization of the state’s public schools. The proposal elevated racial discrimination into a neutral-sounding quest for economic efficiency. The market would see to inequalities via the logic of parent choice; it was simply a matter of “letting the chips fall where they may.”

This was unalloyed bullshit, of course. Given the generations-old imbalance of wealth and power between the races, any laissez-faire approach to compliance with Brown would inevitably reinforce racial inequalities. The state assembly eventually voted down the radical plan, but as MacLean notes, the underlying logic has since burrowed into nearly every facet of our madly privatizing public life—from the Flint water crisis to the attacks on Wisconsin’s public unions—in “a stealth bid to reverse-engineer all of America, at both the state and local level, back to the political economy and oligarchic governance of midcentury Virginia, minus the segregation.”

A major force behind this transformation was the libertarian true believer, oil baron and megafunder Charles Koch. When Buchanan launched another hard-right institute at George Mason University, then a backwater suburban commuter school, in 1982, Koch’s largesse helped bulk it up into a conservative intellectual bulwark. Buchanan and his Mason cohorts minted a new generation of ideological foot soldiers who led the libertarian Right in a steady antidemocratic and oligarchic drift.

After Buchanan had a falling out with Koch in 1998, the hack libertarian economist Tyler Cowen kept hammering away at the Buchananite gospel from his perch atop George Mason’s Koch-funded Mercatus Institute. “The freest countries”—in the laissez-faire sense—“have not generally been democratic,” Cowen wrote in a 2000 essay, citing as exemplars of freedom Augusto Pinochet’s Chile (whose plutocratic constitution was essentially ghostwritten by Buchanan), Singapore and Hong Kong. The hard truth, therefore, is that “if American political institutions render market-oriented reforms too difficult to achieve, then perhaps these institutions should be changed.”

For starters, Cowen suggests, “the weakening of the checks and balances” in the U.S. constitutional order “would increase the chance of a very good out-come.” What constitutes a very good outcome? Nothing less than a wholesale “rewriting of the social contract,” with “worthy individuals” elevating themselves up the social ladder and the less fortunate consigned to shantytowns. “Get ready,” he counsels.

As well we should. One way would be to use MacLean’s excellent exposé to help mobilize an energized small-D democratic electorate. It’s long past time to smite the libertarian Right with a kind of math that can’t be bought.

See why we’re re-inventing the In These Times magazine, and how you can be part of it.

Yes. As evidenced by both Repub & Dem administrations working to crush any leftist government it can get away with crushing for the benefit of the capitalist owners. Dem. 'liberalism' extends only so far as capitalism will allow, which isn't much.

Posted by Human on 2017-08-03 10:45:59

"California is now MAJORITY Hispanic. and Hispanics majority vote for democrats. its no longer representative of AMERICA." They are Americans living in America, so they absolutely are 'representative' of America. The vast majority of people of Hispanic origin in CA are citizens. It's just not representative of your racist dream America.

RE: GOP presidents elected without the popular vote, it never has 'gone the other way'. You know what really is "no longer representative of America"? Gerrymandering. Literally.

Posted by Human on 2017-08-03 10:38:29

This Is A White Man's Government, by Thomas Nash,

Harpers Weekly, September 5, 1868. During the 1868 presidential campaign, political cartoonist Thomas Nast ridiculed the Democratic party as a coalition of Irish immigrants (left) white supremacists like Nathan Bedfoid Forrest leader of the Ku Klux Klan (center), and Northern capitalists represented by Horatio Seymour, the presidential nominee (right). Nashs cartoon depicted Democrats as the oppressors of the black race, represented by a black Union soldier felled while carrying the American flag and a ballot box.

Some political coalitions never change, they just change parties

Posted by Asa Gordon on 2017-08-02 08:04:03

Does that make both Dem and Repub parties conservative historically? So the US Big Business oligarchs and Wall Street money changers - with help from federal govt agencies, e.g., FBI - essentially eradicated genuine left-leaning parties by the mid-late 1950s? Sad!

Posted by JayGoldenBeach on 2017-08-02 00:08:34

I'd like to know when 'In These Times' will publish an article on The White-Supremacist Roots of America’s Democratic Party.

I'll bet not very many readers of this article are aware that the infamous Bull Connors was a member of the Democratic National Committee. Or that former U.S. Senator Robert K. Byrd (D. W Va) was a former Grand Kleagle of the KKK.

Posted by MrJimm on 2017-07-30 21:12:30

MORE TEARS!

Posted by Angry Wasp on 2017-07-30 18:22:26

only if you're hot...

Posted by nunyabizness71 on 2017-07-28 07:07:30

Spit.

Posted by Thansen2007 on 2017-07-27 00:38:57

No, MacLean and her book have NOT been discredited. lol

Posted by smh on 2017-07-26 18:25:26

Fuck libertarians.

Posted by King Monkey-Equal of Heaven on 2017-07-26 18:20:41

More tears.

Posted by Angry Wasp on 2017-07-26 16:53:05

Not only have two oligarchic GOP presidents been elected without the popular vote..............ah, well, that's the system we have. you don't complain when it goes the other way.

and if that's the way you wanna look at it, lets talk about California with its 40 ( I think) electoral votes. California is now MAJORITY Hispanic. and Hispanics majority vote for democrats. its no longer representative of AMERICA. so lets kick it out of the union. whats good for the goose...........

Posted by Goldcoaster on 2017-07-26 15:05:53

Did you bother to read any of the dozens of criticisms of this book that show clearly how Maclean selectively mis-quotes to "prove" her case--including those that focus on the Tyler Cowen quotations that you refer to, which was one of the first major errors noted? And you do understand that libertarianism is not a 'right wing" view, right?

Posted by James Taylor on 2017-07-26 08:13:10

MacLean and her book have been discredited by the discovery of numerous instances in which, through selective editing, she grossly distorted the meaning of quotes on which her characterizations of Cowen, Buchanan, and others hinged, including those in the second- and third-to-last paragraphs of this piece. This on top of the more complex problems arising from her facile understanding of the ideas she wrote about.

As an aspiring journalist, you would have done well to look up these quotes in their original sources, which are readily available on the Internet, and read them in context before taking MacLean's word as gospel.